In today's Enterprise software applications, actions and data displays are typically centered around major business objects. For example, actions and data displays in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application typically focus on major business objects such as Marketing Leads and Sales Opportunities. These types of major business objects typically have a wide variety of related objects such as associated customers, products, marketing campaign information, competitor information, notes, and scheduled activities, for example.
A typical Enterprise software application undesirably limits a user's view of related objects within an object detail page or any page that has distinct pieces of information to only one at a time. Such an application generally limits a user's ability to view the pertinent data to either static tabs (e.g., that disadvantageously allow the user to see only one related object or information type at a time) or a long scrolling list of all sub-regions that are specific to the related objects or pertinent pieces of information.
In some applications, the data provided to the user can be organized in a scrolling list of sub-regions that show all related objects or pertinent pieces of information concurrently. However, such a list is often undesirably long, which can negatively impact the user's productivity and/or efficiency. Also, while there may be configuration options available to administrators of the Enterprise application (e.g., to modify what content is displayed to the user), the data display is still limited to an all-or-one scenario.
For example, a sales professional tends to spend a lot of time dealing with sales opportunities (e.g., leads or prospects that resulted from marketing campaigns). Typical Enterprise applications can be organized around those sales opportunities but, as the sales professional works through the opportunities (e.g., by calling customers or meeting with them), he or she must spend a significant amount of time and energy (e.g., by repeatedly drilling down into a specific opportunity) in order to find the desired information (e.g., the name of the customer, the total projected revenue, and various types of associated information).
Unfortunately, the current applications described above provide a non-optimal user experience. More specifically, today's Enterprise applications do not provide an end user with the flexibility to decide what pieces of information the user would like to see at the same time. Current applications also fail to provide the end user with control as to how the desired information is positioned. The lack of flexibility and user control directly impact a user's productivity as the user is required to navigate back and forth between related objects or pertinent pieces of information (e.g., on tabs) or by scrolling back and forth within a long list of sub-regions.
Thus, there remains a need for a way to address these and other problems associated with the prior art.